Create a live Internet radio show -- free -- with Spreaker! This super easy online tool creates podcasts instantly for you to share with your own URL, on Facebook, Google +, Soundcloud, Twitter, or add to the Spreaker website. Follow others, or invite others to follow your podcasts. With a click of a button you are creating a live podcast. To create a podcast you do not need Flash. However, there are several tutorials, and these tutorials require flash. There is a free version and a more deluxe premium version. This review is for the free version.This site includes advertising.

In the Classroom

Enjoy a live radio show from your classroom! Publish written pieces of writing, science reports, social studies reports, and any other reports you would like to share. Create a New Book or Book Review podcast for the media center. Link to your podcast URL on your class website. Publish directions to projects, explanations for difficult concepts, or even a radio show of you reading your favorite books for your students. Have upper elementary students take turns reading aloud for a podcast aimed at little reading buddies in kindergarten. Allow students to podcast to "pen pals" in faraway places. Record your school choir, orchestra group, poetry club, or drama club doing their best work or dramatic readings of Shakespeare soliloquies. Take your school newspaper to a new level with recorded radio articles. Be sure to include interviews with students, teachers, principals, parents, authors, artists, and almost anyone. In younger grades, use to save an audio portfolio of reading fluency, expression, or to aid with running records or even include writing. Be sure do this regularly throughout the year to analyze growth. Have fun at Halloween with your Halloween station filled with favorite spooky stories! Welcome your students to a new school year by sending them your message. Create messages for classmates who move away. Bring your foreign language classes an extra resource of your pronunciations whenever they need more practice. ESL/ELL, special education classes can often benefit from the extra explanations, practice, and elaborated instructions given at their own pace. The possibilities are endless! The site itself is a "web 2.0," social networking style site, so some schools may have it blocked. Ask about unblocking just YOUR teacher account so you can have students access it while at school and under your supervision.

Discover a free online portfolio or collection place specifically created for children to showcase things they make: projects, work, videos, and pictures. Upload videos or pictures of the projects from your computer or iOS app to the website. With an animal avatar identity and different name, children are not identifiable to outsiders. When a project is shown online, viewers can add stickers to show support. An Android app is "planned." Parents or teachers have a dashboard for reviewing all activity on the account. Students under 13 must provide a parent email for their parents to verify tha they give permission for the membership.

In the Classroom

Leap into the age of technology by making your student portfolios digital. Use DIY for student portfolios of class projects, explorations at home, and family fun. To get started, make a whole-class account to share class accomplishments. Then move to having each student create his/her own. The digital portfolio includes an extra bonus: parent involvement. Using parent emails, the work shared brings a close home-school connection going beyond just parents to extended family and friends. Have basic standards and requirements for posting to encourage quality control. Excite and motivate students using this easy portfolio. Use for an after school club, such as book club, photography club, Lego club, Odyssey of the Mind, chorus, or news team to keep a digital record of events, ideas, or projects. During science fair or any long-term project, record step by step progress. Use as a presentation tool, data notebook, or reflection tool. Teachers of gifted (or teachers who have gifted students in their class) can encourage these students to start collecting a portfolio of their best work, especially projects that go beyond the regular schools curriculum or school year. If a student has a special interest in poetry, rocketry, or forestry, encourage him/her to start documenting accomplishments with explanations, pictures, and links.

Add narration to your PowerPoint presentations to create a great resource for any use. Download Presentation Tube and use the video presentation recorder to produce high quality, easily shared, interactive videos. Combine all parts of the lesson: video, PowerPoint, images, Web sites, and even handwritten notes into the presentation. Upload and publish the finished video presentations to Presentation Tube. You can also post the URL or use the embed code on your own website, Facebook, or Twitter.

In the Classroom

Be sure that your teaching style fits the use of Presentation Tube before using in the classroom. Easily create presentations for students to access. Be sure to play with the software before using to create your first real product. Provide links to presentations on your wiki, blog, site, or other courseware site.

Time is always short in the classroom, and sometimes it's hard to make time for oral presentations. Have the students use Presentation Tube to report out their research, and you and their peers can watch it and grade it any time. Or, have students post their Presentation Tube to your web page or TeacherTube reviewed here, and they can view and peer evaluate the projects. You may want to create your own rubric with student input for this. See a selection of rubric makers here on TeachersFirst. Another idea would be to have students create a Presentation Tube for the results of their research, and then pause and comment during an oral presentation to the class. Students with speech difficulties or challenges with English fluency will appreciate the opportunity to prerecord their presentations without an audience. High school students can also narrate a portfolio slide show for Art school applications or a show of accomplishments for college applications. Students can package book reviews or author reports to be shared in the media center. In primary grades, have students narrate their portion of a whole-class slide show, then share it with parents and grandparents by url. They can practice oral reading as they share their story slides.

Share files hassle-free using Just Beam It! Drag your file into the designated space, share the URL link, and leave the WINDOW OPEN. You will get a message telling you the transfer completed. At this point, it is safe to close the window. If you prefer the traditional file search to find sharable documents, there is a spot to click for that method of file identification. Just Beam It! works by streaming the file directly from your computer to your recipient, and is not stored on the website. Just remember, files cannot exceed 2 GB and keep the window open until the transfer is complete. Beam happily!

In the Classroom

Have trouble sharing files with students because they do not have email? Do they need to share files with each other for collaborative projects ? Try using Just Beam It! No email or flash drive needed. File transfer is quick. Drag, drop and share! So easy, a savvy fourth grader could do it.

Make a free, easy, "ottomatic" bibliography with Ottobib.com. Type in the ISBN number of any book (without the dashes), choose the style, MLA, APA, Chicago, or Bibtex, and create your perfect book citation. You can also enter multiple books by inserting a comma between the ISBN numbers. Select from linking to the bibliography, having a printed page, or finding at your library through a link to Worldcat, an online library catalog.

In the Classroom

Use Ottobib.com as a lesson on citing sources and bibliography on your interactive whiteboard. Include Ottobib.com as a saved favorite on all student computers as well as a link on your webpage. Use as a springboard to discuss styles of documentation including MLA, APA, Chicago, and Bibtex. Be sure to use in writing your own professional articles, books, or classes, as well as a reference for your students.

Discover how to use student-created infographics as scaffold or assessment for learning in any middle or high school subject. Many teachers are not "visual" people and struggle to implement infographics because they do not know how to help students. Whether you are a visual person or a "data" person, these pages will help your class get started. See the story of one teacher's journey into using infographics and learn from her experience. Find downloadable files to help: a PowerPoint you can use with students, and a customizable rubric. Don't miss the extensive Resources and Tools page for examples, background articles, and more. These pages grew out of a presentation at ISTE 2012.

In the Classroom

Read through this professional tutorial if you have even considered trying infographics with your students. You will find just the encouragement you need. Mark this one in your Favorites and share the many examples with your students, including student-created examples from a ninth grade class, as you launch your own infographics projects. Let your students "show what they know" in a new way.

This tool provides a way to scan a URL to see if it contains a virus or links to malware that can destroy your computer. ScanURL will provide you with a checklist letting you know how safe a site is to visit.

In the Classroom

Use this site as part of your Internet safety unit. Scan various websites to see how safe they are. Use this site when you receive an email with an unfamiliar web address. This is one you will want to keep in your favorites, for sure. Parents would like to know about it, too!

Take note of Course Hero with your class. Course Hero looks at various note-taking methods and explores each (using infographics and more). The featured infographic here shows results on written vs. computer note-taking. Discover different types of note taking and research for each. Find the most effective ways to take notes. Caution: this is a public blog, so you may want to preview comments before allowing students to explore on their own. Or simply share this site together with your class rather than using it for individual exploration.

In the Classroom

Use Course Hero to introduce note taking for your study skills class or integrate into any subject. After introducing each note-taking strategy mentioned, have your students try each type and decide which works best for each individual. Immediately after your first audio lecture, give a pop quiz. Let students try note taking and discover the value for success. Use as a remediation tool for learners who need more reinforcement. Introduce in gifted classes, when these learners can no longer rely on simply remembering. At your parent orientation, give this site as a resource. And be sure to provide this link on your class website.

This free voting tool provides instant feedback from audiences or classes. Create a question and a set of answer choices. Choose from various themes and then provide a short link (http://vot.rs) with the ID code of the poll. Participants choose an answer using a mobile device or their computer. Generate a large QR code easily for the fastest linking. View results instantly (which is a plus for interactive presentations or classes). Results can also be embedded on a website. Mentimeter is supported by the most popular mobile platforms.

In the Classroom

Mentimeter is helpful in the classroom as a formative assessment tool. Educators can interact with others inside class or during presentations. Because the poll address and ID code number can be given verbally, it is very easy to create and give to classes. Survey students during activities and lectures to check on understanding of important concepts. Responses can also be open ended by creating your poll without any choice of answers. Students can only vote once per question with this tool.

Find a targeted collection of infographic resources including tools for creating them, collections of great infographic examples, and sites with professional information for teachers planning to use infographics for student projects and assessments.

In the Classroom

Join the21st century trend of infographics as a way to share a lot of information, quantitative data, and relationships in a compact but effective visual space. Help students learn and construct meaning using infographics. Share this collection on your class web page as a starting point for students.

Talkminer is a search engine specifically for video lectures, webinars, webcasts, and presentations. Save time searching for videos that contain exactly the information you need! Search for the exact phrase you need (cell mutation, for example). Talkminer will not only list all the videos, webcasts, etc. that have that phrase, but when you view the item, it will display each frame that has your keywords. Talkminer searches WITHIN the video, webcast, etc. identifying your keywords. No more searching by title, hoping the video will have what you need. Better yet, no more watching the entire video just to find out it doesn't HAVE exactly what you need!

In the Classroom

Use short clips in any grade level to provide background knowledge to your students. Use Talkminer to illustrate a concept you are teaching. If you use PowerPoint or another presentation tool, embed the clip you want directly into your presentation. You can use a tool like Clip Nabber reviewed here to do this. During student research, have them use Talkminer and keywords for their topic to hear expert opinions and take notes for their report. This will give you the opportunity to teach them how to cite a video or webcast for their Works Cited. Students could also embed clips from the videos in their own presentations. You might want them to create their presentation using authorSTREAM reviewed here.

Knovio takes the pain out of PowerPoint presentations by bringing them to life with webcam and audio enhancement. Create a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation, upload the file, press record, and present to your audience. If you are camera shy, disable the defaulted webcam to just audio! Share with people you select through the site's private spaces or share to the world via your social network. When sharing through private spaces, you will need your audience's email addresses. Additionally, when your recipients view your presentation, you will receive an email confirmation of when the presentation was viewed.

In the Classroom

If you have students who are uncomfortable presenting in front of a group or who must be absent on presentation day, they can package their presentations using Knovio. High school students can share "packaged" projects as part of their student portfolio or college applications.

Knovio could take the lecture out of the classroom and free time for hands-on activities. Use this tool to record a presentation that you would normally share with your students in class, add it to your website or wiki, and assign it as homework for students. This allows you the ability to "flip" your classroom. Create student accounts using Google tools so that you can easily share your presentations privately and securely. With the email confirmation, you can be sure that your students have opened the presentation. To ensure that they have viewed the presentation, assign them to take notes from it or write a summary of it as an entry ticket to your classroom on the day after it is to be viewed. Students still have access to the "traditional" way of learning from the teacher; however now you have maximized learning time by allowing for extended thinking activities, laboratory activities, and other higher order thinking activities in your room. This allows you time to facilitate more group projects, student choice assignments, and a deeper level of understanding of the concepts that you are teaching. Knovio could enhance any online teaching, too! This way, your students can see, hear, and learn from you even when they are not in a real-time environment. Knovio would be a great professional tool as well. Administrators could use this to create presentations to share with faculty. Faculty could view on their own time so that when they get to a meeting, the discussion can begin immediately. You can even share information from Back To School night and know which parents actually viewed it.

Discover a reorganized, teacher-packaged collection of Nova resources for bringing science, technology, and engineering to the classroom. Find standards based, classroom resources based on programs from Nova and other PBS programs. There are teacher guides, teacher interactives, and teacher videos. Topics include anthropology, archaeology, earth science, engineering, environmental science, forensic science, geography, health science, history, life science, math, paleontology, physical science, science and society, space science, and technology. At the time of this review, the website is still in BETA version and is not all inclusive in each subject. Find a TV programming schedule to help planning and resource gathering.This site includes advertising.

In the Classroom

Enjoy the interactives, videos, and text together on an interactive whiteboard or projector. Use selected activities as a center (station). Include as resources for your curriculum. Use as a model to make a wiki for your current topic of study for a group project or classroom project. Not familiar with wikis? Check out the TeachersFirst Wiki Walk-Through. Use this format to spice up your classroom blog.

Stencyl allows you to design and build your own and Flash games without any knowledge of programming. Download the program and use their Photo Shop "like" toolset to create the game of your dreams. Visit Stencylpedia to get started by viewing videos, demos, and sample projects. Stencyl also has a library for backgrounds and actors, or you can import graphics from your Mac or P.C. The click and drag capability empowers those with a creative game idea to see it come to reality without knowing any code. Share your game with Stencyl, or on your own site or blog. Stencyl also has tools for creating iOS (iPhone, iTouch, iPad) games, but they are not free (rats!).This site includes advertising.

In the Classroom

Create games for student review and/or practice, or use to assess knowledge before and after a unit. View example games for an idea of what you can create using this tool. One of the best learning tools for kids is to have them create their OWN games. Use your own teacher account so you do not need student emails at school. Ideally, students can create games for either learning or review for their fellow classmates. Assign a small group of students to create a game and then act as "host" to present their research information on a topic and keep the "audience" engaged. Learning support teachers might want to work together with a small group of students to create review games on a projector or interactive whiteboard. The process of creating the game provides another layer of review/practice before students play the game for more repetition.

Moreganize is a tool for scheduling and organizing collaborative events around busy time schedules. Create an event with a title and description. Add an optional deadline for responses. Other options include adding a map or files. Provide contact information. Add possible dates and times for the event. There is an option to include multiple times on each date offered. Send the completed information via url, on Facebook, or via the email link provided on the site. The link takes you to the appointment survey page where you enter your name and e-mail address (kept private from all other attendees). Select which dates and times work for others and which selections are preferred. After confirming choices, a page gives the opportunity to change/correct details. A link is sent via email so your responses can be revisited and changed at a later date.

In the Classroom

Use this site to schedule staff meetings, PTA events, Science or Math fairs, club or student council events, parent volunteer meetings, and more. Student groups of busy high schoolers may want to use it to schedule work sessions. Create a potential list of dates and send a survey using Moreganize to gather data for the best time for all involved. This is a great tool for teams of teachers to use to stay on the same page!

Are you looking for fellow educators to follow on Twitter? If so, this wiki is a great starting point. Choose from many different categories of educators such as librarians, early childhood, professional development, and much more to begin your search. Each link leads to a list of educators to follow on Twitter along with a short description about themselves, simply click on the Twitter handle to go to Twitter and begin following. Be aware: there is a warning on the top of the main page that the wiki is now "locked down" due to spamming. You are still able to access all the links. You are not able to edit without joining.

In the Classroom

Explore the site to discover and follow educators who match your interests and needs. Read the Tweets about what is happening in other classrooms to gain some new/fresh ideas. Want to know more about Twitter? See TeachersFirst's Twitter for Teachers page.

Create and save text-based logos instantly with this easy to use application. Make the logo short, about 50 characters. Type in a class name, title, mythical creature, anything you wish, and generate several different logo possibilities. Click Generate logo again to see more choices. You can bookmark or download and save the ones you like. Save the logo "as is" or modify elements of the logo such as background, font type, or uploading your own image. Download the image as a png file to your computer. Only one free download allowed per day so you may want to plan accordingly.

In the Classroom

Have students create custom logos to go along with book reports, classroom presentations, and more. They can create logos for themselves (using a screen name or slogan) to include on a class wiki or in other online projects. Create your own classroom logo for use on your class website, wiki or classroom stationary. Display the site on your interactive whiteboard to demonstrate how to use different fonts and colors within the program. Share this tool on your class web page so students can create logos any time. For a first week of school activity, if you have access to multiple computers, have students create individual logos of "taglines"about themselves, such as "Lego master" or "Expert dog trainer" and put them on a class wiki page for others to guess/match identities as a getting to know you activity. Others can offer their guesses using the discussion tab on the wiki page.

This simple (yet fantastic) survey creator uses images for the multiple choices instead of text. Video tutorials on the site demonstrate how to create a survey; however, the process is easy to follow. Click on Create a survey, choose a title, layout, and theme and start filling in your survey questions. Upload a picture for each response, and personalize the survey as desired. Completed surveys can be shared via url, Facebook, and Twitter or embedded into websites or blogs. Up to 100 responses are allowed using the free version.

In the Classroom

Share polls on a projector or interactive whiteboard to discuss and informally assess prior knowledge as you start a new unit. Ask questions about the material. Discuss in groups why those in class would choose a particular answer to uncover misconceptions. Use for daily quiz questions to gain knowledge of student understanding and as a means of formative assessment. Have student groups alternate to create a new poll for the next day. Place a poll on your teacher web page as homework inspiration or to ask questions to increase parent involvement. Older students may want to include polls on their student blogs to increase reader involvement or create polls to use at the start of project presentations. Use polls to generate data for math class (graphing), during elections, or for critical thinking activities dealing with interpretation of statistics. Use "real" data to engage students on issues that matter to them. Use visual polls to identify cells or other scientific images as a formative assessment.

Create quick and simple custom jigsaw puzzles. Upload a jpeg image to the site. Choose how many pieces you want and the shape. Jigsaw Planet does the rest. Instantly create a custom interactive puzzle for your students to play! Change the background using tools at the bottom of the puzzle. Puzzles can be saved for your own account, shared with students via a url, or embedded into your classroom website for easy access. This site requires Java.

In the Classroom

Use these puzzles on your projector or interactive whiteboard! Each puzzle is timed as you put it together. Split students into teams to see which team can complete the puzzle the fastest. Instead of the typical PowerPoint type presentation to teach students facts, create a puzzle for them to put together and have them read the fact once the puzzle has been completed. Turn your classroom rules into a series of jigsaw puzzles for students to put together. Honor your star student of the week by creating a puzzle of that student. Just take a picture of the student and upload to Jigsaw Planet. Students can use Jigsaw Planet to create their own puzzles. This is a great place for them to study. They can upload spelling words, math facts, maps, etc. Students will love creating their own jigsaw puzzles. If you have a projector or an interactive whiteboard, have students create a puzzle all about them. They can create a collage of things they like in a presentation program, take a screen shot of it, and upload the puzzle to Jigsaw Planet. Students can put together each other's puzzles and guess who the student is based on the pictures. This would be a great getting to know you activity for the first week of school!

Create interactive online activities quickly and easily with LearnClick's Create a Gap. Submit any text you'd like to learn and mark the text you want deleted for a fill-in-the-blank type of activity. Easily create quizzes or tests for individualized students or your entire class. Create a free account with your email. Follow the simple steps to create tests in minutes with varying options for response style choices; blank boxes, generated drop downs, or drag and drop. Search the quiz bank to save time. The free version allows you to make up to five quizzes, which are published on your public page. Your public page allows a direct link to your quizzes.

In the Classroom

In the classroom, use as a review tool on your projector or interactive whiteboard. Assign as homework for a study aid. Create study aids for ELL/ESL, or learning support students to review and learn with a "techie twist." Let students take control! Have students create the tests, in order to find the main idea or quiz each other. Use in centers for a fun review of current vocabulary, concepts, or even mathematical practice. Divide the class into cooperative learning groups to cover all aspects of one topic. The subject areas are limitless. Use as a "Jeopardy" style competition. Post on your website as a resource for parents to help their students keep motivated to study in a fun way!